With linked e-books/audiobooks, there’s ‘time enough at last’ to read

If you want Amazon
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CEO Jeff Bezos to respond to your emails, take a tip from Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, 43, of Vancouver, British Columbia, and use the subject line: “Thank You! You’re Awesome.”

“I just want to compliment you on the most amazing piece of technology I have enjoyed from Amazon,” Moskovitz wrote Bezos in December. “Your Whispersync System for Kindle and audiobooks is incredible.”

For the uninitiated, Whispersync for Voice is Amazon’s clunky name for a feature that devotees like Moskovitz say profoundly changes the very act of reading. The rabbi stumbled onto the option after buying “The Hunger Games” e-book for his Kindle, and Amazon offered (with one additional click) to throw in the audiobook for just $3.95 more. So instead of enjoying Katniss Everdeen’s adventures in dribs and drabs each night before dozing off, Moskovitz shot through the novel like one of Everdeen’s arrows, switching back and forth between the audiobook (while driving) and the e-book (at home) without ever losing his place.

As technological breakthroughs go, linking the audiobook and e-book versions of the same text so that a Canadian rabbi can read young-adult novels quicker may not be an innovation on par with creating the next Google
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or Facebook
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, but one could argue it’s worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize — at least in the Twilight Zone.

Let me explain: In the show’s greatest episode, Henry Bemis, a nebbishy bank teller played by Burgess Meredith, only wants one thing: to bury his bespectacled nose in books. But his domineering boss and even more domineering wife thwart his efforts to read Dickens, Browning, and Shaw. It’s only when an H-bomb wipes out everyone else on the planet that Bemis has “time enough at last,” to read — that is, until his glasses slide off his face and shatter along with his dreams.

Thanks to Amazon’s Whispersync, that nuclear war is no longer necessary. Despite the five decades’ worth of free-time destroying distractions invented since the episode aired in 1959, a modern-day Bemis doesn’t need the world to end (and with it Warby Parker) to find time to read. Like our rabbi, he could shuffle the pages of books into every spare minute of his day: listen for 30 minutes while jogging, thumb through a few pages on his iPhone while waiting at the doctor’s office, listen again while doing the dishes or walking the dog, and then switch back to the e-book once more before bed. Amazon’s killer app is no longer Prime, it’s time.

There is one odd thing about all of this, Rabbi Moskovitz told Bezos in his email: Amazon does almost nothing to publicize it. “When I tell my friends and congregants about it…they have never heard of it, even though many are Kindle users,” he wrote. “Also, it’s hard to find the service on the Amazon website — I have to Google it every time.”

Here’s how Bezos replied: “I agree it’s extraordinary and I will pass on your encouragement to the team. As the team has said to me: ‘You can ‘read when your eyes are busy!’ I will also pass on your suggestion that we make this easier to find. All best, Jeff.”

I was told about this correspondence between rabbi and CEO during a recent visit to the Newark, N.J., headquarters of Audible.com, the Amazon subsidiary and audiobook pioneer behind Whispersync for Voice. I, like Rabbi Moskovitz, wanted to know why the feature seemed to be buried on the Amazon site. Apparently it won’t be for much longer.

“Look, it’s going to have to be much more prominent, much easier to use, with lots more content and the right pricing,” Audible CEO Donald Katz told me. “We were trying to keep it quiet while we make it better, which is why the rabbi’s email was so amazing.”

Katz wouldn’t say just how many e-book/audiobook pairs customers have downloaded since the feature had its soft launch in September 2012, beyond that the number is “in the millions.” But use of Whispersync for Voice increased 256% in the year ended Dec. 31, and jumped 42% in the final month of the year alone, the company says. Some 42,000 titles are now equipped for the feature, and adding the linked audio narration to an e-book now costs $5 on average, with the price ranging from $0.99 to $12.99 (depending on how supportive a particular publisher is of the idea).

As Katz whisked me around Audible’s offices, which is dotted with conference rooms and recording studios named for Newark luminaries like Philip Roth, and all the frills and trappings of a major tech company, I was struck by the one thing that was missing: books. Though employees marched to and fro with laptops tucked into the crooks of their arms, I did not see a single hardcover or paperback in the place. Even in the studios where the audiobooks are recorded, the actors read the text off a screen.

To Audible, print books are a “legacy format.” Technology is blurring the lines between the written and spoken word — all that matters is the words, not how they’re packaged. “Text is the basis of theater, it’s the basis of movies and television — they are all just a performance and an interpretation layered on top of words,” Katz, a former journalist and the author of several books of his own explains.

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